enclos*ure

Vintage landscape: more snow in Washington, D.C.

December 26, 2012January 23, 2014 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

“Woman and girl standing in icy square, Washington, D.C.,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Uriah Hunt Painter, 1837-1900, took a number of snapshot photographs of his neighborhood around Franklin Square and of downtown Washington using the first Kodak cameras. Painter was a businessman and retired newspaper reporter.

“[The p]hoto shows a woman and a young girl posing mid-square with bundles. The two may be Painter’s wife, Melinda Avery Painter, and older daughter, Eleanor, returning from a marketing trip. Or perhaps Painter took their portrait because the girl is holding another Kodak – exemplifying the growing corps of amateur photographers who took advantage of Eastman’s simple box camera.”

— from the LoC online catalog

Above: “Market scene, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter. I don’t know which square is pictured in these photos.

Above: “Franklin Square, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1989, by Uriah Hunt Painter.

Today’s quote

Pope’s famous lines, in his “Epistle to the Earl of Burlington,” on ‘the genius of the place,’ . . . surely evoke a conception of The Garden as an epiphany. For Pope, ‘the genius of the place’ does not refer, as it does for many later writers, to the ambiance or natural setting of a garden: rather, it is that which ‘Now breaks, or now directs, the intending lines’ and ‘Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.’ Palpable, here is a sense of The Garden as both a response to and an exemplification of something beyond the control and invention of human beings.

— David E. Cooper, from A Philosophy of Gardens
(Thanks to View from Federal Twist.)

Vintage landscape: snow in Washington

December 25, 2012 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

The view at night, under snow, of the Post Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1911. Via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, photographer unknown.

Merry Christmas!

Recent finds

December 24, 2012April 13, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure4 Comments

I knew the thing
before I knew its name. . . .*

I went outside yesterday and discovered this single dark orange Gerbera daisy (probably Gerbera jamesonii or Transvaal daisy) in the back flower bed.

I was so pleased because I’ve been looking for more orange flowers to tie together two orange-flowered shrubs about 7′ apart in a mostly yellow section of the front garden (they are too large to move). It divided into four little plants when I transplanted it.

We have a lot of coral pink Gerberas. They bloom all the time and are a nice color for setting off flowers in red, orange and white, and violet and blue areas.

They are also a super-tough perennial for warm climates. Back in Washington, D.C., we mostly see them as cut flowers or potted plants sold in a grocery store. Gerberas are the fifth most-used cut flower in the world, according to Wikipedia.

A couple of weeks ago, I also found this in bloom in the back area:

Goldenrod (Solidago) — I immediately divided it and took some pieces to the yellow border in the front.

I had been watching the plant for a couple of months, thinking it was possibly a weed, but also thinking that it looked familiar. I should have recognized it — Solidago rugosa ‘Fireworks’ is one of my favorite perennials.

There are over 100 species in the Solidago genus (both it and Gerbera are in the Asteraceae family), so I doubt I’ll identify it more specifically than ‘goldenrod.’ The plant is native to North America, although a few species are found in South America and Eurasia.

I searched for images of Fireworks on Google and found my own picture was number three on the page. This was sort of thrilling (I lead a very quiet life.) Strangely, pictures of our dog Sophie, were numbers seven and eight — I guess because I had put them in the same post. (There’s a nicer picture of the plant here.)

An interesting story from Wikipedia:

Inventor Thomas Edison experimented with goldenrod to produce rubber, which it contains naturally. Edison created a fertilization and cultivation process to maximize the rubber content in each plant. His experiments produced a 12-foot-tall (3.7 m) plant that yielded as much as 12 percent rubber. The tires on the Model T given to him by his friend Henry Ford were made from goldenrod.

Extensive process development was conducted during World War II to commercialize goldenrod as a source of rubber. The rubber is only contained in the leaves, not the stems or blooms. Typical rubber content of the leaves is 7 percent. The resulting rubber is of low molecular weight, resulting in an excessively tacky compound with poor tensile properties.

Miscellany

David Montgomery of The Washington Post has a sad story today about the elimination of “Ye Olde Yule Log” from this year’s events on the Ellipse (in front of the White House):

For more than 50 years, it was one of the quirky miracles of holiday Washington. Groundskeepers stoked the fire around the clock. They used a forklift to feed it giant stumps and trunks from trees that had been marked as “hazardous” and culled from national parks in the region. Tourists and residents would gather around the mesmerizing inferno, sharing stories with strangers, feeling uplifted as much by the smoky, sparky nostalgia of it all as by the sheer unlikeliness of such a scene in this locked-down, plugged-in world.

The National Park Service has a contact page here, by the way.

If your potted poinsettias are already getting on your nerves, you may want to cut the “flowers” (I know — bracts) to arrange in a vase. Here’s an article from The Telegraph on getting them to last.

*by Ian Parks, from “Goldenrod“

Lady Bird Johnson

December 22, 2012December 22, 2012 Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

Today, December 22, is the centenary of the birth of environmental advocate, businesswoman, and former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson (Claudia Alta Taylor).

Texas bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis). Public domain hoto by Dr. Thomas G. Barnes, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. — Texas bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis)

While her husband was president, she created a First Lady’s Committee for a More Beautiful Capital and then expanded its efforts with successful support for the Highway Beautification Act of 1965.

In 1982, Johnson and actress Helen Hayes created an organization to protect the native plants and natural landscapes of North America. It became the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas.

Some of her words:

“Though the word ‘beautification’ makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more: clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.”

“The environment is where we all meet; where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become.”

You can listen to an interview about Lady Bird Johnson, An Oral History on “The Diane Rehm Show” at the link on the sidebar under “Today’s Quote.” Adrian Higgins of The Washington Post wrote a tribute to her in October, here.

Public domain photo above by Dr. Thomas G. Barnes, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.